Cellphone calls faked

Much of what we know happened on the hijacked 9/11 flights came from passengers and flight attendants, who called family and others to pass on key details. Yet there are those who say the calls were faked, scripted, a tool to sell the hijacking story, and the voices behind them weren't those of the real passengers at all.

A key technical objection to this comes from a study carried out by AK Dewdney. He flew over London, Ontario, in a light aircraft, while trying to make cell phone calls, and concluded that "ordinary cellphones, digital or analog, will fail to get through at or above 8000 feet abga". His study is flawed, however: he flew over a populated area with a large number of base stations, which means the range of an individual station could be considerably reduced: we would expect calls at altitude to be difficult. Read more here.

David Ray Griffin seems to think the number of calls was significant, saying "At least nine of the calls were reportedly made on cellphones" in "Debunking 9/11 Debunking", then reporting the following:

"At 20,000 feet, Dewdney concluded, "the chance of a typical cell phone call making it to ground and engaging a cellsite there is less than one in a hundred... The probability that two callers will succeed is less than one in ten thousand." The likelihood of nine successful calls at that altitude, he says, would be "infinitesimal," which in operational terms, he added, means "impossible".Chapter 1, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, David Ray Griffin

However, there are serious problems with this assertion.

The first is that there's very little evidence that nine of the calls were made on cellphones, as opposed to airphones (seatback phones that would work at altitude). Griffin gets this figure from Rowland Morgan's "Flight 93 Revealed", and a glance as this reveals his figures mostly come from press reports. So, for example, Morgan points out that Elizabeth Wainio was a cellphone caller according to this September 22 2001 MSNBC report:

Clear enough. But do we know for sure she was passed a cellphone, or has someone just made that assumption? We would say the latter is at least possible, as a September 28 2001 specifically says she was passed an airphone:

In reality, FBI testimony at the Moussaoui trial spoke of only two cellphone calls from Flight 93 (although they admitted the possibility of at least one more). Dr Griffin concedes the point later, after a fashion:

...when the Government was in court, where its claims might have been challenged, it was not willing to risk having to defend the claim that nine or more cell phone calls had been made from Flight 93, most of which would have been from six miles up. It suddenly reduced the claim to only two calls.Chapter 1, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, David Ray Griffin

Here he presents the total of "nine or more cell phone calls" as though it was a Government claim that they've been forced to retract, but that is false. That total comes from people like Morgan, who are simply assuming that reports of cellphone calls are accurate, and contradictory claims of using airphones are not.

Were there even airphones of the American Airlines flights, though? It's been reported that they were deactivated by that time. However, American Airlines manager John Hotard says that while the deactivation order preceded 9/11, he could find nothing to say it was carried out on Flight 77:

Engineers at our primary Maintenance & Engineering base in Tulsa tell me that they cannot find any record that the 757 aircraft flown into the Pentagon on 9/11 had had its seatback phones deactivated by that date. An Engineering Change Order to deactivate the seatback phone system on the 757 fleet had been issued by that time...
It is our contention that the seatback phones on Flight 77 were working because there is no entry in that aircraft’s records to indicate when the phones were disconnected.John Hotard, Corporate Communications, American Airlines

Even if there were only two calls, of course, there's still AK Dewdney's claim that the chances of both being successful were "one in ten thousand": 1/100 multiplied by 1/100. But that's misleading. Apart from the probability being based on his flawed study, he's also assuming we're talking about two specific call attempts: passenger A calls, gets through, passenger B calls, also gets through. What we don't know, though, is how many call attempts each passenger might have made. If each hit redial 100 times, for instance, then even on Dewdney's figures he would expect them both to make a successful call, and in fact think them unlucky if they didn't.

No need to take our word for it, of course. There are plenty of people saying that calls are possible from much greater altitudes than 8,000 feet. Read a selection of them here, then ask yourself - is it really plausible they there are all mistaken or lying?

But what about the "pico cell?", asks David Ray Griffin, amongst others. In Debunking 9/11 Debunking he quotes American Airlines as saying it allowed passengers to "place and receive calls as if they were on the ground", that "commercial availability of cell phone use in flight is approximately 24 months away" (as of 2004), and says "this new technology would hardly have been hailed as a breakthrough if cell phone calls from airliners had already been possible".

In reality, though, there's a huge difference between cell phone calls from airliners being "possible" (but only occasionally, and only for short periods of time), and working as if passengers "were on the ground". It's the latter service that people will pay for.

Further, cell phone calls aren't allowed right now because airlines are concerned they'll interfere with electronic systems on the plane. The pico cell is all about overcoming that, as this 2005 press release explains:

Siemens has been chosen to work with Airbus to provide a lightweight GSM pico cell and an on-board channel selector, major features of the OnAir passenger communications system that will ensure the safe and effective use of mobile phones on aircraft for the first time.

George Cooper, OnAir CEO said, “This is a significant milestone. Siemens bring huge expertise to this ground-breaking business enterprise. We are very pleased that such a strong player in the telecom industry is taking on a critical role in making the OnAir vision happen.”

Siemens is providing a lightweight GSM pico cell and on-board channel selector which will ensure that passengers are able to use their mobile phones during flights without generating interference to the aircraft systems or to the ground mobile networks and thereby complying with certification and regulatory requirements. Web Archive copy

The pico cell breakthrough comes in offering more reliable, safer use of mobiles at altitude, then. There's nothing here to say the 9/11 cell phone calls could not have been made.

As an alternative explanation, Dr Griffin, Loose Change and others have mentioned the possibility of "voice morphing", technology that could have been used to fake the voices of the passengers. At the heart of the claim is this 1999 Washington Post story:

"Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.

At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.

But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

This poses obvious problems. Like how did the conspirators obtain a “10-minute digital recording” of several passengers? Especially as many of the ones who made calls weren't even supposed to be Flight 93 passengers until the very last minute.

"Jeremy Glick was supposed to have been on Flight 93 a day earlier, but missed the Monday flight after getting stuck in traffic on his way to Newark Airport... Another passenger, Lauren Grandcolas was on her way home to Marin County... Originally scheduled on a later flight, she had been pleasantly surprised to easily get a standby seat on Flight 93 at the airport. “I can’t wait to see you,” she told her husband Jack in a message she left on the couple’s answering machine before dawn in California, telling him she would be home a few hours early".http://web.archive.org/web/20040626080457/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3067652

And they’re not the only ones. In fact, so many people changed their plans within around 24 hours to take this flight, that has been marked up as an anomaly in itself. A Team8Plus page (http://www.team8plus.org/content.php?article.8) points out this also applies to Jeremy Glick (missed his flight the day before), Mark Bingham (took an extra day to recover from a birthday celebration), Honor Elizabeth Wainio (changed to a direct flight at the last minute) and possibly Edward Felt (last-minute business trip) amongst those who made phone calls, and others who didn’t.

But let's suppose this were possible. The article also told us that the system works in “near real time”, in other words there’s a time lapse between the person speaking, and the system morphing their voice into someone else. How long? It doesn’t say, unfortunately, but it’s unsafe to assume that this system is capable of carrying out real-time conversations. And it's not just us saying that, either, as Dr George Papcun, the scientist quoted in the Washington Post "voice morphing" story, has also issued his first comment on the issue:

Purveyors of conspiracy theories have claimed that the events of 9/11 were the result of a massive government plot and cover-up. (See, for example, (www.loosechange911.com.) According to their version of events, there were no hijackers. Instead, the World Trade Center buildings were blown up by explosives planted inside the buildings rather than, or at least in addition to, the effects of the passenger airplanes crashing into them. They claim that the government (or the CIA or someone other than Osama bin Laden and the hijackers) was behind 9/11.

However, a major problem for their allegation, given that they claim there were no hijackers, is that the passengers on United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania called home with desperate messages to loved ones, in which they said there were hijackers. Accordingly, the conspiracy theory purveyors have needed to claim that someone (namely, me) created the voices of the passengers in those phone calls. That allegation is plainly outrageous and demeaning to the memories of those courageous passengers.

I originally developed the technology of voice morphing, the technology by which it is possible to make someone seem to say something they did not say (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm ) and coined the phrase. Therefore, I know what would have been required to create such bogus calls. Practical considerations preclude making counterfeit telephone calls in this situation. For example, it is necessary to have samples of the voices of the people to be imitated. In situations like this, where the goal is to participate in an unconstrained conversation, the voice sample must be extensive. I cannot imagine how I might have obtained extensive samples of the
voices of the passengers on Flight 93, especially not knowing which of them would call home. Additionally, in this situation it would be necessary to know what someone would say to his or her loved ones under such circumstances. What pet names would be used? What references would be made to children and other loved ones? Do believers actually suppose that the government (or I) listens in to everyone's pillow talk? In a separate essay, I will cover the technical aspects of voice morphing, which will further demonstrate the implausibility of the scenario set forth by the purveyors of conspiracy theories.

Whether such wild-eyed theories are worth being concerned about is problematic. However, in their own words, their conspiracy theory organization "has grown from a cult following to a grassroots organism that can no longer be contained" (op cit). I have received email from a high school social studies teacher who told me that her students actually believe that I did everything the purveyors of conspiracy theories say I did. Why they would so mistrust their government and be so naïve with regard to technical issues are interesting questions, albeit matters well beyond the scope of this essay.Dr George Papcun

As Dr Papcun points out, while the voice morphing is difficult enough, it's dwarfed by the challenge of managing the content of any conversation. How are any conspirators going to know how an individual is likely to behave in this situation, what they might say? There can't be any guessing here, no slip-ups, you can't afford to make a relative suspicious. You must have an "actor" who can react precisely as the passenger would, on reflex.

And as an example of the research required, consider the call by Linda Gronlund, who reportedly called her sister to pass on the combination of the safe containing her will (which suggests no-one else knew it, because otherwise why bother?):

Linda Gronlund, called her sister, Elsa Strong.
Elsa Strong says, "She said, 'Hi, Else, this is Lin. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you.' And she said, 'Please tell Mom and Dad how much I love them.' And then she got real calm and said, 'Now my will is in my safe and my safe is in my closet. and this is the combination.' And she just told me the combination of her safe.http://billstclair.com/911timeline/2002/msnbc090302.html

In our view the case against the passenger calls is far from proven, then. Plenty of people say it's possible to make calls from altitude, the study claiming otherwise is flawed, and the conversations were most unlikely to have happened by "voice morphing". On balance, we believe the calls were genuine, reflecting what the passengers saw and experienced on 9/11.